I use Synergy to share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple Mac’s and PC’s. Recently I added a new machine to the setup and was frustrated to discover that the Synergy client on the new machine just refused to connect to the server, without any attempts I would immediately get the following error message:WARNING: failed to connect to server: Timed Out

Everything is configured properly in regards to settings on all clients and the server, so what’d I do to fix this error?

Change the host connect-to name from the hostname to the machines IP address, and instantly Synergy connected and everything worked as usual.

I don’t really know why the “Timed Out” message was appearing when it obviously wasn’t even attempting a connection, but nonetheless switching the client to connect to the host IP works fine. This occurred using Synergy clients and servers running 1.3.1. If you’re running into a time out error with Synergy, check your logs and try this fix out. You can check your Synergyd error messages by opening the synergyd.log log file either manually in Console, Terminal, or through SynergyKM.

7 Comments

Some good developers took upon themselves to update the synergy source files and maintain them. They are working hard on making it even better. You should take a look, I use it to share a keyboard between 3 machines and I don’t have that issue on my mac.

Thanks for the tip,our synergy stopped working for no reason we could think and was bringing up the same time out error , we never upgraded systems or anything similar, but by changing to the ip address as you suggested had synergy back up immediately.

I’m on 1.4.4 and get the same error. Tried changing to IP and I’m still running into the same. I’m able to ping to the server machine using both the hostname and ip address without any issues. Any help would be greatly appreciated

I’m also experiencing this same issue, I can ping both IP addresses, but I just keep getting the time out error message.
Besides, when I go to “Help” on my server syngergy, it has a different IP rather than my PC’s IP. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I had that issue as well. Running server on Redhat and client on XP. The problem was that the firewall on the Linux system was blocking the client from connecting. To stop the firewall, type “service iptables stop” on your Linux host.